Every idea you have is now buildable. Often by a single person. By you. By me. How's that working out for you? Because managing it all is absolutely breaking my brain.
There's a concept called the Dunbar number -- the count of relationships a human brain can actually maintain. A few close friends, a dozen good ones, a hundred-some acquaintances. Promote somebody into the inner circle and somebody else drops out. The limit is real.
Social media ignored that limit. We collected thousands of "friends" and developers a permanent, low-grade guilt about all the people we never keep up with. We fucking broke that part of our brain.
We're doing the exact same thing with product and engineering right now.
AI means one person can build anything. So we do. Every idea becomes a tool. Every annoyance becomes a feature. And suddenly there are 50 systems running with no product org, no engineering org -- just one increasingly overwhelmed brain holding all the context.
I built Gmail into my own coaching tool because switching tabs annoyed me. Took an afternoon. Works flawlessly. Until it doesn't.
It's one more system I now have to manage forever. Plain text on day one, then rich text, then signatures, then who knows. And each improvement is one more status I have to remember. One more decision whose root cause I will almost certainly forget. Why did I build this?
Ask yourself: of everything you've built this year, how much of it do you still understand?
Tech debt didn't go away. We've stopped employing the people who used to carry it.
AI won't bail us out, because AI is fantastic at code generation and horrible at simplification. Point it at your sprawl and ask for a refactor and you won't get something better. You'll get something different. That's entropy in action.
You probably can't hire your way out of it if you're bootstrapping. But three habits cost almost nothing:
- Keep a decision log for every core system. Every time you make a functional call, append it in your own words. You'll never read it front to back. But when you catch yourself asking "how the hell did I get here?", the answer lives somewhere other than your brain. Point your AI at your session history and have it rebuild the log for you. It's all in there.
- Let ideas age before you build them. "I could build this in an afternoon" is exactly why you shouldn't build it this afternoon. Write it down. If it still hurts in a week, build it. Most ideas don't survive the week.
- Subtract on a schedule. Once a month, list everything you have running. If you can't explain a system in one sentence, freeze it or kill it. AI only ever adds. You're the only one who subtracts. Learn to love "please remove the following features from the code base..."
You can build anything now. You just can't remember everything you build.